Garage Door Advertising: Growing Your Garage Door Installation Franchise

How should you spend your garage door company’s advertising budget? What are the best ways to get the word out about your garage doors franchise and acquire more garage door installation leads for all of your locations? 

Below you’ll see detailed responses from two experts. One is an SEO (search engine optimization) consultant and the other is the founder of an online marketplace for roofers, who share a lot of the same concerns as garage door installers. 

Read to the bottom, where we offer up our own list of tips to help you decide where to invest your advertising dollars and efforts for the best results. 

1. Mike Khorev, SEO Expert and Marketing Consultant

Based on my experience there are two main ways you can advertise garage doors and the installation company/business in general:

Content Marketing + SEO

In this approach, we develop content related to garage door installation (shouldn’t be promotional), for example: “Top 10 Garage Doors in 2020,” or “How To Install Garage Doors,” and other tips and tricks related to garage doors and the installation.

Then, we are going to optimize the content and the website to rank higher on Google’s SERP. It’s very important to note that the content itself shouldn’t necessarily be the one advertising the garage door product, but the purpose of the content is to bring traffic to your website where then we can offer follow-up marketing efforts to introduce your product (putting banners on our site), capture their contact information, and so on.

The main principle here is to make sure our content provides real value and is relevant for our target audience, so it can attract them.

PPC Ads

Deciding between content marketing (and SEO) vs. PPC (pay per click) ads is mainly a case of time vs. cost.

Content marketing and SEO are certainly effective, but we’d need to invest a significant amount of time before we can see significant results, at least 6 to 12 months. Not all businesses have that luxury of time. 

PPC ads, on the other hand, are almost guaranteed to be effective provided you have enough budget. But the problem is that it can be very expensive if you are not careful. 

So, the key here is finding the right balance between the two, especially by making sure your PPC ads are displayed to the right target audience (the ones that are more likely to convert). We can also utilize remarketing/retargeting to improve the PPC ads’ ROI.

2. Jesse Silkoff, Founder of MyRoofingPal

If you’re starting with a small or nonexistent budget, the best way to generate leads early on is through social media. It requires a lot of hustle and upkeep, but it’s worth it so long as you go about it the right way. Make a lead capture landing page on your site and have an offer there. For example, a business offering garage door installation could give a voucher for 10% off the install. If giving a discount isn’t something you can do, promise to do it quicker than your competition, or offer more incentives. Just put something out there that people will want and have them give you their email address to get it. Then use your social media accounts and interact within your industry, occasionally advertising your offer. 

Additionally, SEO can be another cost-effective way to bring in leads, but again you have to do it the right way. Use the Adwords keywords tool and spend a day researching what keywords bring traffic for your industry. Put them all into a spreadsheet and be sure to record the CPC for advertising in case you decide to do that later. 

Keywords and Content

Target keywords that have a high volume but aren’t oversaturated with traffic, and keep an eye out for long-tail keywords. Create content for your main page and potentially a blog that’s relevant to your business and useful to people who might search for it. For example, a post on how to get a garage door open if you’re locked out and don’t have a remote handy, or a post telling homeowners how to know if their garage door is in need of repair. 

These combined efforts will help bring in relevant traffic, and once you have a budget for it, you can further monetize them with a paid mailing list and PPC ads respectively. 

What Are the Pros and Cons of Using an Agency? 

If you think you have enough budget to hire an agency to help with advertising your garage door company, there are a few things to consider.

Ad agencies that specialize in PPC have knowledge and experience in terms of keywords, bidding, and desired results. That can represent a very big advantage, but it comes at a cost. Not only will you have to pay a management fee for the agency to monitor your ads, but they may also have minimum budgets that you must meet. Sometimes agency fees are charged as a percentage of your ad budget, with an agreed-upon minimum spend. 

Should You Try to Handle Your Franchise’s Garage Door Advertising Yourself? 

Taking the time to learn how to outbid your competition and convert new customers in a cost-effective way can pay dividends over the long term. You want to consider hiring someone to handle “ad buying” on your internal team. Make sure they have time in the schedule on an ongoing basis to monitor and manage your ad budgets.

If someone on your team has an aptitude for PPC or social media ads, then, by all means, keep it in-house. Don’t forget that it may take some time (and spent budget) before you work out the kinks and discover what works for your business. 

How Long Does it Take to See Results? 

That depends on the kinds of ads, the kinds of offers in your ads, and the typical sales cycles for your garage door installation business. In the case of PPC ads, the potential customer is searching specifically for the keyword you are bidding on. In that context, they are in a buying mindset and should take some kind of action right away. A conversion might take the form of subscribing to your newsletter, requesting a quote, booking a visit from one of your techs, or calling you directly. 

With social media posts and ads, the people who see them might not be in the market for a garage door right away. In this case, the audiences and targeting you choose can make all the difference. Even with the best targeting though, this tactic will take a bit longer to generate leads. 

What is a Lead Magnet and How Do You Use One? 

A lead magnet is an item or offer that entices someone to become a lead. An example might be a voucher for a free smart home speaker if someone requests a quote and then books a garage door installation. Other examples might be a free quote or a downloadable garage door buyer’s guide.

Offering this lead magnet in your ads can help convert curious shoppers into leads that eventually book a garage door install with you. 

Turning Garage Door Advertising Leads Into Customers 

There are a number of ways to convert leads into customers. Some amount of sales follow-up will work best — either a series of emails, a callback, or a site visit if the customer has asked for a quote. Once someone has expressed interest and become a lead, find a sustainable way to follow-up with them to make sure their questions get answered. 

The better and faster your follow-up, the more likely you are to win the business. 

Another great way to convert leads into customers is to offer them a way to book with you, either for a quote or for the installation job itself. Garage door installation software with online booking makes this possible and can give you a massive competitive advantage. 

Learn More About Garage Door Software with Online Booking

Want to learn more about how online booking can help you convert more garage door installation leads and bookings for your franchise? Read our online booking ebook. And if you’d like to see garage door software in action, book a free, private demo of Vonigo.